Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) vs DeepSeek V3 (Dec '24)
Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) by Anthropic or DeepSeek V3 (Dec '24) by DeepSeek? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Depends on your budget
Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall… scores 32.3 points higher (40.8 vs 8.5) but costs 25× as much to run the benchmark ($622 vs $25.4; premium vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fall… when you need intelligence above 8.5, and DeepSeek V3 (Dec '24) when 8.5 is enough.
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) | DeepSeek V3 (Dec '24) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 40.8 | 8.5 | −79.2% DeepSeek V3 (Dec '24) is 79.2% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $622.28 | $25.37 | −95.9% DeepSeek V3 (Dec '24) is 95.9% cheaper |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 5.74s | 11.84s | +106.3% DeepSeek V3 (Dec '24) is 106.3% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $2.00 / $10.0 | $0.32 / $0.89 | |
| Input modalities | Text, Image | Text |
DeepSeek V3 (Dec '24) vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback): 79.2% less intelligence, 95.9% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 106.3% slower end-to-end.
Against the frontier
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 (Medium, Default Fallback) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (High) scores 50.20 for $521.
- DeepSeek V3 (Dec '24) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.
Compare something else
Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/deepseek-v3 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-5-5-medium/deepseek-v3?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill